Ultrasound imaging has provided useful information about the interior characteristics of an object or subject under examination. One US scanner has included a one dimensional transducer array with 64 to 192 transducer elements. Such a one dimensional transducer array has been used to acquire echoes corresponding to an axial plane (or two dimensional slice, which is transverse to a longitudinal axis) of an organ(s) and/or structure (e.g., a biopsy needle) in the body. In B-mode imaging, the echoes have been used to generate scanlines, and the scanlines have been used to generate a scanplane, or two dimensional image of the plane, which can be displayed via a monitor. With frame rates of 10 Hz or greater, the B-mode scanplanes can be combined with color flow, Doppler flow, elastography, contrast harmonic, and/or other information requiring higher frame rates.
In order to additionally view a plane in another orientation (e.g., sagittal, or along the longitudinal axis), the clinician has to rotate the transducer head to the other orientation. In response to rotating the transducer head, the displayed two dimensional axial image is replaced by an image from the other orientation. In order to utilize the images from both orientations, the clinician must make a mental image of (or memorize) the axial image and then mentally construct a three dimensional view based on the mental image of the axial image and the displayed image from the other orientation. Unfortunately, it may take years of experience before a clinician is able to mentally construct the three dimensional image, the mental image is susceptible to human error, and the two images used to construct the three dimensional image do not reflect the same point in time.
One technique for concurrently acquiring and displaying intersecting images of different planes is to use a biplane transducer, such as transducer Type 8814, a product of BK Medical, Herlev, DK. Generally, a biplane transducer includes two separate one dimensional transducer arrays arranged with respect to each other to concurrently acquire data corresponding to two different and intersecting planes (e.g., axial and sagittal planes). Using a biplane transducer mitigates having to rotate the transducer head from one orientation to another orientation to acquire intersecting images of multiple planes, and the images are acquired at the same time. However, the images have been presented side-by-side. As a consequence, the clinician still has to mentally combine the images to construct a three dimensional view.
A two dimensional transducer array allow for simultaneously acquiring a three dimensional volume of data. Ray casting or other techniques have been used to select data for one or more planes of interest, such as two intersecting planes, which can then be volume rendered in a three dimensional view. However, with two dimensional transducer arrays, relatively lower frame rates (e.g., on the order of 2-5 Hz) generally are utilized in order to simultaneously acquire the large volume of data (e.g., 16K, or 128×128). Unfortunately, such lower frame rates are not well-suited for applications including color flow, Doppler flow, elastography, contrast harmonic, etc., which require higher data rates. Furthermore, two dimensional transducer arrays generally include a lot more transducer elements than their one dimensional counterparts (e.g., 16K to 128 in the above examples), which tends to make two dimensional transducer arrays significantly more costly than one dimensional transducer arrays.